


hearts in atrophy

by ihaveastorminme



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alfie Solomons/Anna Gray - Freeform, F/M, Grace Lives, the fic is weird but im over it, the origina character is anna
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 14:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19134133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihaveastorminme/pseuds/ihaveastorminme
Summary: “It’s a little too much to believe isn’t it?”“Tommy!” There’s a sharp warning in her mother’s voice, but her cousin is calm and does not back down. Anna can practically see his mind turning as he looks at her. If she can see people hiding things, as if their secrets were cookies they hid behind their backs like children, perhaps Tommy could too.“That a girl of thirteen-““Fifteen.”“Fifteen, faked her own death, changed her name, successfully managing to get away with it. It sounds a bit on the impossible side.”Anna shrugs. “Nothing’s impossible if you’re desperate enough.”All of them, Tommy too, laugh.[summary will change when I upload the second chapter]





	hearts in atrophy

_note: i imagined Anna as a redhead, just because I have only just seen Lawless, and Jessica[Chastain as Anna ](https://ihaveastorminme.tumblr.com/post/185443939846/el-rigby-lawless-2012-modern-au-forrest)makes[special sense](https://ihaveastorminme.tumblr.com/post/185443938081/kdelario-goodbye-forrest) to me rn, of only for [aesthetics](https://ihaveastorminme.tumblr.com/post/185443990756) [purposes](https://ihaveastorminme.tumblr.com/post/185443988081). _

 

i.

The yard is a hundred foot long and dissected by a cobbled street. Lines of washing are strung across the courtyard and the sheets flap in the breeze. She hears a woman shout at her friend across the street and they reach each other, huddle together whispering and continue on down down the road, giggling. There are children playing the cobbles. Women hanging washing or bringing it in, calling out to each other. Their voices echo against the tenement walls. There is an energy in the air that defies the grimness of her surroundings, a vigour that like that of a great river. The people, the noises… Everything is alive and grey and for a moment, it overwhelms.

It should not. This is not the most crowded place she’s ever been in, nor the dirtiest or loudest but that is not the point. It is not why she stops and looks around as if every detail matters. As if she needs to look into every nook and crate, like they will help for that picture in her head that has been fractured for so long. The pieces fit but she doesn’t  know if the canvas she is setting them into is the past of her faded memories, or a dream she might have had. She has so few memories of home and not all of them are good, but she’s been trying to get back here half her life all the same. Home, home, home, like a second heartbeat inside her skull. Persistent. Relentless. And she hardly remembers it.  

There have been times - dark, desperate times, when she thought she would never make it back - when her bitterness whispered to her clearest and told her there was a difference between memory and a dream. Told her that she would never be wanted back anyway, even if she found out what that difference was. That after all she had lived through, she was not the girl she had been when she was taken away, and the place would not be the same, and it would spit her out again. But now she is here, and the difference between the memory and the dream does not matter. It cannot. She has to see this through to the end, if only so that she can finally put it behind her.

A cat rushes past her, quick as a shadow and Anna stops for a moment. Distantly, she hears the thumping roar of heavy engineering factories. She is not afraid, exactly. Her heart is hammering against her ribs as if it wants out, and she is sweating but she knows this is not fear.

She walks on.

-

The first thing she notices is the horseshoe nailed on top of the door. It makes her smile. The pub itself is ostentatious. It speaks of wealth that wants to be seen and heard. It speaks of pride… and of the ambition and insecurity beneath. She spends half a thought wondering who chose the decor, before sitting on a stool at the bar and taking off her gloves and hat.

She can feel the looks on her back. On her coat and the hem of her pants visible beneath it, on her hair. She wants them to look, of course, but she is also incredibly aware that they are looking. In her line of work, she is accustomed to being seen when she wants to be, as much as she is accustomed to becoming invisible when she needs to be, but this is neither. She is exposing herself – _her_ self, not any other face of persona - and it makes her uncomfortable because it goes against all her instincts. There is no design here apart from being recognised for who she is. 

But she knows that none of the Shelbys are here. One glance around the room when she went in had told her.

The girl she had been had tried to remember all their faces but the woman she had become had poured over their military files the moment she got them. She knew what they looked like now. But she did always remember blue eyes, though. Her mother’s voice singing old songs, in their language. The sounds of smashed glass is part of her memories too. Her father had not been a quiet drunk, but the memory of him is so vague, it’s like smoke.

“Well good morning to ya.” The barman says, smiling. She smiles back.

“Yes it is a lovely morning, isn’t it.”

The barman is thin as a reed but he has strong hands and his eye is steady as he looks  her over, trying to place her. He wouldn’t be able to.

“You’re staring sir.” However, she says it with a smile, and the man laughs.

“Begging your pardon madam, but we don’t see the likes of you that often ‘round ‘ere.”

“I stand out that much, do I?”

The man shrugs and picks up another glass, washes it, starts drying it.

“Not so much with the standing out. There ‘are beautiful women ‘round here plenty. But then you opened your mouth, and - there it goes.”

She laughs. “Yes, away it goes, doesn’t it?”

“What can I offer you on this fine day, miss?[1]”

“I will have finest whiskey you have, sir.” She pulls out a cigarette as he sets the glass in front of her and pours. She does not ordinarily smoke, but most of her marks do, and she’s learned that sharing a cigarette with them will go a long way. She sips on her whiskey slowly, makes small talk with the barman, catching the questions behind his questions and answering them all with the truth. She is here to see her mother, actually. No, he wouldn’t have seen her around here, but she was born not far from this very neighbourhood. Yes, she still does have family close by. She’s waiting for them, actually. 

“And who might they be, miss? Maybe I know ‘em.”

“The Shelbys.”

When the barman looks at her this time, he doesn’t smile. “Aye, which one of ‘em are you waiting for?”

“Any one of them will do, I suppose. Though I am told I better speak with Tommy Shelby first.”

There it is. Now she won’t need to want too long.

The second whiskey arrives and she’s been sitting there on that stool for perhaps thirty minutes, when a man comes and sits on the barstool right next to hers, even though there are others which are empty. She looks at him without trying to be subtle and blinks her surprise away when she recognises him. The peak of his Stetson Hatteras puts his eyes into shadow, but she can see from this close that they are as blue as hers. In the folds of his hat she spies the glint of a hidden blade she knows is there, and bites back a smile.

_Yes, indeed._

John Shelby looks less like the boy he was in his military picture, but he’s young still. Anna knows he is not even 30 yet. And he is immaculately groomed and pretty too; even more so when he smiles at her. 

She remembers his smile. It’s as if the memory of her cousin’s boyish face was just hidden in the back of her mind, and seeing him dislodged it, and it fell right into her lap. The realization brings with it rush so strong it almost knocks her off her perch on that stool. He used to smile often when she was a child; it was exactly as she remembered him - smiling and happy.

It almost brings tears to her eyes.

“I’ll get straight to the point, shall I?” he says and Anna chuckles.

“Please do.”

“What business does a lady such as yourself have with Thomas Shelby, if I may ask?”

She tucks her hair behind one ear. “You may ask, certainly, but I may choose not to answer.”

He grins at her. “And why is that?”

“Because you’re not Thomas Shelby.” She tells him with a small a smile.

He laughs. “No, but everyone agrees I am better looking.”

He extends his hand to her, an invitation. She takes it and they shake hands as his own whiskey arrives.

“John Shelby, at your service.”

 _Yes, I know_.

“Anna Grey.” She says softly, and watches him choke on his drink and then cough for a good five minutes.

When her cousin gets himself under control, he looks at her again, eyes watering and face reddened in patches. She meets his assessing gaze with steady eyes of her own. In the sudden silence of the pub, his whispered ‘fuck!’ rings as loud as a door slamming shut.

-

She is ushered into a back office without much ceremony and is told to wait there. She hears it when John walks back into the pub and tells everyone to keep their fucking mouths shut, and keep on doing what they were doing.

They don’t want word to travel back to her mother, it seems, before they can be sure she is who she says she is.

She had expected it. Had expected for them to doubt her word, and had prepared for it but she still could not stand the waiting. She should be better at it. By all accounts and when it came to a job, any job, she was impeccable, her patience infinite, her mind always sharp, with no room for boredom. But this is not a job, she reminds herself, and there was more at stake here than a bullet to the brain.

She has never been so close to getting everything she’s ever wanted, and never been so afraid of never having it.

The mind is a strange place, Anna decides as she pulls out another cigarette.

“I should stop fucking smoking.” She says and then offers one to the woman sitting on the chair in front of her, watching her. The woman, Lizzie, accepts. She had been sitting at the desk outside the office when Anna was shown in, and she assumes she is a secretary of some sort. Anna feels her assessing gaze go through her from head to foot. Her intelligence is proved when she decides that whatever her conclusion about this sudden guest, she would keep her mouth shut about it.    

When the doors open with a clash, Anna knows who it is.

Thomas Shelby looks different from the picture in his military file as well. He looks older and his eyes are colder, though he is just as well dressed as his brother.  He stalks towards her and by the  thunderous look on his face, she almost expects him to hit her but he doesn’t. He takes her arm, his hold not unkind but not allowing for resistance, and walks to the closest window, where he can see her in the light of day. His eyes take in everything, the bright red-gold of her wavy hair, to her upturned nose that everyone always said was just like her mothers, to the stubborn chin she’s always been told she had and the shape of her mouth which to her has always looked ridiculous. She watches him in turn, but his face gives away little beyond his anger; wonders what her own face gives away, if he recognises anything as he looks at her as if the truth of it would be written on her skin.

“I want you to know that if you’re lying, I’m going to drag you out back, shoot you in the head and bury you in my yard, whoever you are.”

“Yes, i thought you might.”

His left eye twitches. “Did you now.”

“You used to take me riding, when I was a child, on a grey mare you called Lily. I fell off her one time, slammed my head against something, got a nice cut to show for it. I still have the scar.” She lifts her hair off the side of her face and there, on the upper right side of her forehead a white scar peaks through her hair. Thomas Shelby takes her chin between his forefinger and thumb and moves her head so that he might see her better.

When he lets her go, she smiles at him. This she remembers vividly. It was a memory that she’d clung to fiercely. 

“You used your handkerchief to wipe away the blood and you laughed when I said I wanted to get back on the horse before I had even gotten the blood off my face. You told me I was as fearless as my mother.”

His throat bobs and he leans back, just a little. She looks at Arthur, as he comes in with John and a couple of other boys behind him. They don’t even close the door, every eye is on her. Her eyes flicker from one of her cousins to the other.

Arthur looks as if he’s not even breathing.

“You used to throw me between the both of you like I was a doll, do you remember?” She looks at John then, and smiles. “You used to laugh all the time and when you thought no one was around, you’d sing to me.”

Beside her, Tommy curses softly. John though, doesn’t bother to keep his own words quiet.

“Fucking hell.”

She watches him turn away from her and wipe a hand down his face. The boy beside him looks pale. His hand is shaking when he lights his cigarette, and he keeps staring at her.

“You were dead. The records of your movements showed you died of spring fever.” Thomas Shelby says, and it sounds almost as if he’s accusing her of something.

Anna nods. “Yes, I’ve died several times.”

The anger returns. “Don’t play with me, girl. I don’t like games.”

From what she knew of him, games were something Thomas Shelby excelled in, but she does not point this out. Before she could say anything else however, the outside door slam open so hard that it is a wonder the glass does not break. The closed doors do nothing to muffle Polly Shelby’s voice - and when she hears it, a shiver goes through Anna, one so strong she shakes.

“Move, Lizzie”

“Polly, Tommy said-”

It is so silent in the study that Anna hears the unmistakable cocking of a gun, clear as day as if her mother had unlocked the safe right in her ear.

“Do not fucking try my nerves, girl, I _will_ shoot you where you stand!”

John moves to the door as if someone has pushed him. “Fucking Christ, Polly, calm down!”

He had barely opened the doors when a woman barrelled right through him and into the room like a storm. That is how Anna remembered her. Loud and fierce, and sweet as honey when she sang her to sleep.

Her mother.

They lock eyes, and Anna feels her heart swoop and fall all the way to her feet.

She looks older now, but she is as beautiful as Anna remembered, her hair dark as her eyes and curly as her own. Their colouring is so different people used to say Anna was not Polly’s daughter at all, and her mother used to curse at anyone who dared say that to her face. Now that she is a woman, Anna can see her own bone structure in her mother’s face: the defined cheekbones, the proud brow, that same stubborn chin.

Yes she is her mother’s daughter. None of it was a dream.

But Polly Shelby stands frozen now, staring at her with those familiar eyes that shine like mirrors. It takes some moments for the tears to fall, but once they start they do not stop.

“Come closer, girl. Come here.”

Anna does. She stands directly in front of her mother. They are exactly the same height now. It is strange and frightening and sad, to standing in front of her and see her for a woman of flesh and blood, when in her memories her mother used to fill whole rooms with her presence. She had been by far the tower that loomed largest in her mind.

Anna raises her hand to her mother’s face and wipes one tear away, and then another. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

“I had a dream about you, almost a year ago. I heard you, in my sleep.”

Anna is shocked into silence for the first time in years. She can’t help the sharp breath that leaves her, as if someone has squeezed the air directly from her lungs.

“Yes, I was calling.”

Polly’s lip trembles. More tears fall. Anna blinks back her own. She will not cry. She won’t.

“You haunted me for weeks.”

She feels the sting of shame, then. It is clear that her mother means that in the most literal sense.

“I got shot and thought I was going to die.” Her ribcage tingles with the awareness of the wound there. “I… did not mean to cause you pain[2]. I’m sorry.”

Polly touches her hair where it falls to her chin in waves, and laughs. It is nothing but chance that has them wearing the same hairstyle, but yes, Anna can see the hilarity of it.

“Your hair used to be longer, wasn’t it?”

Anna turns to see her brother there, looking at her like he doesn’t know what to do. She nods, and he nods back.

“You used to wear in brads.” He says again, opens his mouth then closes it again, gulping down whatever other words stuck on his tongue.

Polly laughs, touches her hair again. “Yes. And every time they would come loose, with all that running around she did.”

Michael looks away. “I always thought I remembered it wrong. That it was just some dream or something.”

Anna has to laugh. Those words exactly... “Yes, sometimes so did i.”

Her mother hugs her then and it’s as if someone opens a window and all the questions run out. Anna lets herself be held, pushes her face in her mother’s neck and breathes her in, warm and heady, and here. With her. Her greatest wish, for years: to come back into her mother’s arms.

She doesn’t cry, but it’s a close thing.

-

Later, after she has been passed around and hugged more times than she has in all the years she’s been away from them; after she’s met the rest of her family and had a raucous dinner amongst them in her mother’s house; Thomas Shelby puts a bottle of Brandy in the middle of the table and fills their glasses, expectant. He has questions. Anna had known he would. She has prepared which parts of her story she would tell them all, but makes it clear from the start-

“I will not lie, but I will not tell you all of it.”

“You have something to hide?” He asks, eyes are unflinching on her. He is the kind of man who will shoot you without hesitating, Anna surmises. It does not surprise her. Perhaps it might even console her.

“Many things.”

Her mother takes her hand and smiles at her gently, tentatively. Anna has seen many of her family members glance at Polly through tonight’s dinner, as if she was constantly surprising them every time she touched Anna’s hair, or the back of her hand, or smiled at her, or offered to make her tea. Her mother it seems, is not a warm woman, nor a woman that will serve anyone easily.

That consoles her too.

“You know you are safe here. You’re among family; we would never betray your confidence.”

She kept touching her and Anna cannot say that she minds the attention. As far as fulfilment of fantasies go, the affection Polly keeps showering her with aligns very closely with what Anna had always hoped to find when she thought of home.

“I don’t doubt that, but-” How to put this in a way that was true, without betraying the secret she was keeping? “Coming back hasn't been easy. I have done some things that were terrible. I regret some of them, and some I don’t. I don’t want to drag back every terrible thing.”

“Let sleeping dogs lie?”

She looks at her brother. “Something like that, yes.” She leans forward then, smiles at him, her baby brother[3]. “I’ll tell you my life, if you tell me yours.”

-

As it turns out, her brothers life had been precisely the opposite of her own. There are things he hides – she can tell exactly when he chooses to admit something. He has tells, her brother. He is no used to lying and his anger over the things he hides makes his secrets easier to spot. But she will allow him his secrets. She is not here for those – she’s here to give away some of her own.

She tell them little about the homes she was put in those first two years. She doesn't go into detail, because the details don’t matter. They could have been the best families or the worst, and she would have still run away.

“After I escaped from the second foster family they found for me, I was put in a group home in London.” She takes a cigarette out of her pack and her mother lights it for her. “Thank you. It would have been easier to escape from the institution - nobody really bothers with the kids who try, and by the time I got there I even knew how to take a train to Birmingham, but… the director there took a shine to me, let us say.”

It’s as if the words turn the very air into stone. The tension in the room crackles like stepped-on broken glass. Her mother, by her side, looks stiff as a board and angry enough that she would start screaming if someone so much as breathed on her.

Oh yes... she is her mother’s daughter, isn’t she. It is written plain as day on Polly’s face and it was like looking into a mirror. And there’s more written there too. Anna reads her mother’s eyes, and its as if Polly whispered the very secret into her ear when no one was looking.

There is knowledge there that does not come from any second hand.

Anna had been twelve when she’d realized what it meant when a man three times her age looked at her with rape in his eyes. Oh, he’d been subtle about it, for sure. Been polite and gentle, because he was a Lord and he presented himself as someone noble. It had taken her some time to see his careful coaxing for what it was. A favour here and there, exchanged for a kiss, here and there. What was a small kiss after all, if you were hungry enough? 

“He used to say I was his secretary, as if it was some joke.” Anna grins at her mother, surprising her. “So one night I slipped led in his tea, and when he fell ill, I ran away again.”

“And what is this man’s name?” Thomas asks, hissing the words between his teeth.

“Oh there’s no need for that, he’s quite dead.” Anna says dismissing the matter with a careless wave of her hand. “I only brought it up because he was the reason I was send to Australia in the first place. And that was before he could do anything he wanted to do.” She adds more softly.

The words are meant for her mother alone, because she alone seems to be hurting over this, instead of being angry or outraged.

“Did you kill him?” Michael asked, sounding surprised.

“Not then, no.”

She’d come back for him though. She’d sworn she’d see him dead when she’d been thirteen and angry enough to set the world on fire and she’d lived with that promise between her teeth until she put a bullet through his eye, and out the back of his skull years later.

Revenge, Shoshana always said, was a dish best served cold. And Anna had learned she could hate with a fury so cold no one would ever feel it move before it consumed.

“What do you mean, he was the reason you were send a world away?” Polly asks.

“Baelysh, teh director of the institute, had my papers forged to make it look like I was sent out of the country, so that no one would ever find me. Once I was caught however, he was found out, and I was shipped off foreal.” 

She looks away. This would be a difficult part. Not because she is afraid of their judgment, but because she still ahs not forgiven herself for not being smarter.

“When caught me I was boarding the train to Birmingham. The women who took me back to the institute made it very clear to me that I was a ward of the state until I was eighteen, and that that was exactly how long I had to wait until I could go home. Or do anything I wanted to do.” She stubs out her cigarette with more force than she intends. It still made her angry to this day. “It was then that I understood that I missed a chance. I could have lied when they caught me. Given them the wrong name, given them some address close to Birmingham. Shaved my head so they wouldn’t know me.”

Arthur scoffs. “You were a child. You didn’t know any better.”

Anna looks at him dead in the eye. “A child who knew enough to try to kill a man.”

For a moment that seems to last too long, no one says anything.

Anna clears her throat. “Anyway, a year and a half later there was a spring fever at the home I was un, in Sydney. I saw my chance and this time I took it.”

“It’s a little too much to believe isn’t it?”

“Tommy!” There’s a sharp warning in her mother’s voice, but her cousin is calm and does not back down. Anna can practically see his mind turning as he looks at her. If she can see people hiding things, as if their secrets were cookies they hid behind their backs like children, perhaps Tommy could too.

“That a girl of thirteen-“

“Fifteen.”

“ _Fifteen_ , faked her own death, changed her name, successfully managing to get away with it. It sounds a bit on the impossible side.”

Anna shrugs. “Nothing’s impossible if you’re desperate enough.”

All of them, Tommy too, laugh.

“God’s honest truth.” John says, and Arthur pats her back.  

“They didn’t examine the sick kids very closely, for fear of contagion. I found an order girl in the morgue, changed our name tags and medical charts and hid until they buried her.”

“Where did you hide?”

Anna turns to look at her brother, who had not laughed and is looking at her like he wants to pry her open and see everything.  

“In the doctor’s office. He helped me.”

“Why would he do that?” John asked this time, frowning.

It was a good question. Why would a man of thirty-five help a girl of fifteen, and a pretty girl at that? John is right to assume, and for most men he would have guessed correctly, but Eisen had been different.

“His mother told him to.” Anna said simply. Her cousins laughed again. 

The full answer would probably have been less amusing to them. That Eisen helped her because old Shoshana had seen Anna during the Sunday meals she brought in the common house, and known her for the quick and smart girl she was. Because she had immediately been able that she had been behind the latest prank on the headmaster of the institution and she had laughed himself silly at the thought of it. Because Anna could read and write and she was pretty, and Shoshana had needed a pretty girl to become a pretty maid in the governor's household during the war, to poke around his papers, to steal secrets. Someone smart enough to pretend she wasn’t as smart as she was, she’d said, her dark eyes dancing with amusement.

And who better to spy on a dangerous man, than someone whose family was half a world away, who nobody would miss and who desperately wanted to go home. Desperation after all, was always reliable - it wasn’t Shoshana who had taught Anna that.

But if Anna had told her mother and uncles the whole truth, more questions would have risen, and she would also have given them the wrong idea. Shoshana had been a cunning woman, but she had also been a friend. Her mentor and someone who taught Anna the skills she needed to survive the world she’d entered.

One way or another, she was still the reason Anna was alive. That at least, her family could appreciate her for.  

-

Her brother was part of the family business. Her mother is very proud of this fact, and she wants Anna to become a part of it too. The legitimate part, at least, like Michael, even though Michael is not at all satisfied with the position he has. He wants more. He wants to be Tommy Shelby, Anna thinks. Though sometimes she is not so sure. Her brother’s secrets are her own, but she cannot help but wonder.

She finds that she doesn't have to rebuff anyone when it comes to the less legal sides of it all. Whether they don't want her getting into it, or think she would have nothing to offer, it doesn’t matter. She likes her life this way, at least for a while: spending her with her mother, her cousins, getting to know the people she had left behind.

There are so many strings between all these people, they form a net in her mind so intricate that they could put any spider to shame. At night she lies awake and traces the threads one by one, like going over a plan of attack, searching for weaknesses, threads to pull to unravel the whole thing. When she realizes she is doing it, she stops. They are her family, not a mark, and Anna knows this, but she cannot help the way she has been taught to think.

It gets harder to stop, in time. A nagging feeling of unease grows in the back of her head as Tommy’s wedding approaches, and Anna can no more ignore her instincts than she teach herself to breathe underwater. Her very skin feels alight with the tension she carries day to day.

She knows at Tommy’s wedding that whatever reckoning is coming, will hit soon. Her cousins are rash and they make mistakes.

It doesn't even take that much probing to find out what shitpile they’re in. She only needs to hear a name for it to click into place. She wonders if her cousins know how close to the fire they are dancing, over Lizzies Italian man. That whole mess is just one big shitstorm waiting for a shore to hit, and they act as if they don’t even realize it. The way her John and Arthur deal with it is, however, so blatantly antagonising, she has to wonder if Tommy means to start a war with the Mafia. The she has to wonder if he is indeed as mad as they say.

One night, when she’s taking a drink with her mother before bed, she decides to speak.

“Mother.”

Polly doesn’t look up from the book she is reading, but reaches for Anna with her free hand. “Darling.”

“I need to tell you some things, and I need you to promise you won’t ask me how I know. Is this acceptable?”

Polly’s eyes snap to hers, her posture going from relaxed to tight as a rod within a single moment.

“I don’t know, love. I don’t want to make a promise to you and then break it.”

Anna nods. It’s an honest answer.

“The man that John and Arthur beat up, the Italian – he has a family in the United States. A family that is very much like our family, and very much not.”

“Anna-”

“I needed you to know what I know. Maybe you already know this. Maybe you do not. But I have to say it.”

Polly’s eyes on her are assessing, and after a long moment, she nods. “I understand.”

“Angelo brother runs things in his family. If this escalates and someone ends up dead, the Changretta will come for us. Not just Tommy, or John and Arthur, but for _all_ of us.”

“And you know this by word of mouth do you.”

“I’ve been to new York a few times. It’s a well known fact there who the Changretta are. As it is well known in Birmingham, who the Peaky Blinders are.”

Polly nods again. “Alright.”

But Anna can see it in her mother’s eyes. This is not all of it.

“You worry about me.” She says, and Polly bites her lip.

“I never stopped worrying about you.”

“Don’t. I am here and I am well. There rest is past, mum. It’s gone.”

“God, you sound-“

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” Polly brushes a hair away from Anna’s face, and kisses her goodnight, before telling the she would pass her words along to the boys. And forbid them questions. Anna cannot say she is not relieved, though she doesn’t expect that to stop Tommy for long.

-

On those last few days before all hell breaks open, she can feel it. The tension, the awareness of it crawling along her neck on millipede legs. She’d known; even before it happened, she had known it was only a matter of time before _something_ happened. She could see the shell coming in the rigid line of Tommy’s shoulders. It was about to explode, any moment now.

And it did.

She could have let it unfold of course. She could have stood by and kept her cover -

Which was all a lie, of course and as a woman who traded in lies, Anna knew one when she saw one. Her cousins had their faults, but she could no more have allowed Grace or Tommy to get shot for those faults, than she could have allowed her own arm to be chopped off. She had made her peace with this months ago, though she only realizes it once she sidles up behind the only armed stranger in that opulent beautiful ballroom, and knocks a whole tray of drinks into him right there in the corridor, making him curse[4]. She apologises profusely, fusses over him, and she can see how nervous he is. How his eyes flit about the room, how his hand twitches for his left pocket.

She knows what he’s going to do the moment he decides to do it. Before his had goes to his gun, Anna has grabs his arm and twists it into an impossibly angle, until she feels the bone break. She kicks the back of his knees and then shoves him face down into the pavement, before his screaming ca reach he rest of the guests in the main ballroom.

 _Sloppy_ , Shoshana whispered in her ear and it was all Anna could do not to grumble.

 _I make do with what I’ve got,_ she thinks as she drags the man into the closest empty room she can find.

“The fuck is going on?”

Anna almost pulls a gun on her brother, before she realizes who it was that followed her.

“Jesus!”

“Michael, I need you to get Arthur or John in here. Quietly,” she adds and when her brother nods, she knows he understands what she means.

She watches the unconscious man on the floor and as she does, her vision opens up and blurs, and she swears she can almost see the future, as clear as a row of dominoes falling.   The commotion from the other room comes at her as if seh were underwater. Someone grabs her and instinctively, she twists and bends the arm holding her to an impossible angle.

“Fuck’s sake girl, getoff me!”

Anna releases Arthur as if he’d burned her.

“Sorry, sorry. I was... distracted there, for a bit.”

Arthur looks at the man on the floor and then back to her. “What the fun he do to piss you off, ey?”

Anna takes a breath. “He meant to pull a gun on Tommy.”

She doubted it had been Grace he’d been aiming at, anyway. When the color drained out of Arthur’s face, she knew it had begun.

-

“How did you know?” 

It is easy to hear Grace Shelby when she approaches you. The tapping of her heels give her away and Anna thinks perhaps that is how she likes it. Maybe she likes people to see her approach in all her bells and whistles, so that they can miss whatever blade she might be carrying to slip between your ribs.

Anna shrugs. “I didn’t.”

Grace’s eyes are cold, her face impassive. She is not hiding now. “But you saw him before anyone else did.”

It is not a question, so Anna doesn’t bother with an answer. Grace comes closer, sits in the chair next to hers, watches her closely. Her cousins are in the other room, her whole family in there, but she chose not to join them even thought she was invited, and Grace stayed with her out here, in the lunge. Tommy has turned his home into a fortress. There are men everywhere and no one is shy about showing they’re armed, and yet Grace Shelby managed to approaches her at a moment when she is alone, just as her mother stepped away for the first time tonight.

_She’s been watching me all night._

Anna meets Grace’s eye.

There is something about her gaze that is eerily like Tommy's. Their minds turn along the same tracks, Anna knows this, though Grace hides this truth behind blonde hair and fashionable clothes.

“Did your mother tell you what I did before I became Tommy’s wife?”

She’d been another man’s wife. But Grace would not appreciate her wit, Anna was sure. And the dig at her dead husband would have been cruel. Grace Shelby had almost died tonight. She did not deserve more cruelty.

So Anna answers with a simple yes.

Grace smiles. “Of course she did.” She leans closer. “So you know what I mean when I say that it takes one to know one.”

Anna gives Grace her most innocent look. “No, I don’t think I do.”

“I know a liar when I see one, Anna.”

“I have not lied once since I came here.”

“No, but you never tell the whole truth either.”

Anna raises one eyebrow. “Do you know anyone who does?”

Grace sat back again, considered her. Considered the situation again from the top, probably.

“You saved Tommy’s life tonight. Save my life too probably.” It sounds as if she’s repeating it to herself.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone else might have seen him before I did.”

“And yet Arthur was on the other side of the room and John was half drunk.”

Anna keeps silent still, and when Grace looks at her again, her eyes burn as if someone had lit a fire inside her skull.

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t.” Anna repeats.

“You fucking did and you will tell me.”

Anna rises to her feet. “You know, I have never much liked being ordered about.”

Grace rises as well, and though she might not have noticed the silence around them, Anna does. “My husband was almost killed tonight, and if not for you either he or I would have died. You are part of this family, like it or not, and out of the thirty men in that room who were supposed to keep us safe, it was _you_ who saw trouble before it happened. So no, I am not ordering you to do anything. I am asking for your help.”

“They don’t want my help. And they won’t have it.”

“Oh yes, they will.”

Anna turns to see her mother behind her. “If they know what’s good for them.”

-

Tommy phones Alfie late at night, knowing that the other man is probably asleep and not caring.

On the third ring, Alfie picks up.

“Fuck is this?”

“Alfie, it’s Tommy.”

The grumble on the other side of the line nonsensical for a moment before it made sense again. “Bit late for social calls innit, mate? You trying to get shot?”

“I have found someone that can help you with your little shipping problem.”

He waits a moment, knowing he has the other man’s attention.

“And it couldn’t wait for a fuckin’ decent hour?”

“No. I will send her to you, and she-“

“She?”

“Yes, _she_ will get you get what you need. And in turn, you will help me with something I need.”

“Oh, I will, will I? A’righ, Tommy fucking Shelby, fuck off.”

“Don’t hang up! I am offering a solution for a solution. We both get what we want.”

“Except it’s never that easy with you fucking arseholes innit, mate? Right? And since you have no manners whatsoever, I’m not goin to discuss this _any_ _more_ with you until you get some and have the decency to show up, right, to my office, like a fuckin gentleman, and talk business.”

“She is on the train to London tonight, and will meet you tomorrow night, in your office, after closing.”

“All these plans you made about to go up in smoke, mate. Shame, no?”

“Refuse her if you want, but hear her out.”

Alfie turned on his back and rubbed a hand through his beard, wincing when he touched his old scars. “And how will i know this little bird you’ve send my way, Shelby?”

“She has red hair and is bound to be the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. You’ll know its her.”  

“Well isn’t that just lovely.”

“She’s my sister, so you’ll keep your hands off her and be a fucking gentleman or you will lose them.”

“Bit early for this kind of talk, mate.”  

“That’s non-negotiable, Solomons.” Tommy insists and Alfie has to smile.

“I always am a gentleman, arn’t I? Although, with all respect, I’ve see your sister, Tommy and she’s not a redhead nor is she the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Meaning no offense to you, mate.”

Tommy said something else but Alfie didn’t quite hear him, and didn’t quite care to.

“Alright, now we can end this lovely phone call then. Fuck off.”

* * *

_[1] I’m not a native English speaker, and while I have some proficiency with normal English, accents elude me completely, so I would just butcher them if I tried to write in an accented language. I hope you guys can read it the way the characters sound._

_[2] Again, for the purpose of this fic (and because I have only seen the first two seasons and know that Grace dies eventually), Grace here is alive, a year after Polly has that dream about her daughter wanting to say goodbye. I don’t know how this matches with the TV show timeline though, so bear with me._

_[3] For the purpose of this story, Anna is 25 years old. Canonically, Michael was five when he was taken from Polly, but I decided to age Anna and make it that she was 10 - because I wanted her to remember, and because I needed her to be older for her backstory to make sense. And, you know, cause Alfie is in his 30s, and any bigger an age difference between them creeped me out._

_[4] The only thing she changes is Grace’s death. The rest I’m keeping as canon_


End file.
